John Stammers's impressive second collection, Stolen Love Behaviour, focuses, like its predecessor, on love poetry, but this time the mood is darker, more burdened; here, as the title implies, we enter the realm of subversive affairs, hidden desires. The book explores the shady areas of libido and guilt, of bars, boudoirs and basements, the fragile underbelly of the hip and sophisticated.

Significantly, Baudelaire puts in an appearance. Stammers offers two takes on the latter's sonnet "Parfum exotique". The first is virtually a straight translation, closer to the idealising impulse of the original. The second is an adaptation, more denuded, more pitiless - the speaker has a terrible hangover. Baudelaire's exotic landscape ("indolent climes", "lagoons", "fruiting plants") is transformed into a tacky bar - the entrancing aroma of the lover's skin becomes the smell of eau de cologne "that leads me by the nose to this outpost / of glam where barstaff and bouncers blear / into the welter of last night's pulls".

Stammers's flâneur is here trapped rather than liberated by the excesses of the city. Unlike his first volume, with its impulsive and infectious celebration of the now, he is frequently here the poet of the morning after - post-coital, post-relationship, post-love.

One of the central features of the book is its constant parodying of pretensions to the sophisticated and urbane. Take the poem "Fancy Man", which explores the emotional hollowness of a speaker who prides himself on embodying such qualities: "In photographs in Sunday magazines / of contemporary buildings and galleries / there is always a room that I am in. / I am looking out at you in sunglasses. / I stand in the shadows so that you cannot fully see me. / Someone did something to me once / and I have never forgiven everybody."

This is an excellent passage, relishing the dynamics and superficiality of image, though it builds to the slightly over-eager and melodramatic final two lines. Would such a self-deceiving speaker deliver this brutal personal revelation? Here Stammers has perhaps briefly interposed himself a little too much.

But then again a lot of the pleasure of this volume comes from such foregrounding. Time and again Stammers makes fun of the way he has been heralded as the embodiment of a kind of hip urbanity: "I've been caught in the company of uncool friends: / the clinging tracksuit bottoms, / the companionable tea-stained jumper, / trainers like lolling dogs' tongues."

These lines are from the sequence that lies at the centre of the collection, "Closure". On one level the poem is all about a lack of closure. It dramatises with great skill the events of a single day back in the mid-90s when the speaker's marriage collapsed. At its heart is the question: how do you deal with the past, how do you shake off the grip of nostalgia? The central irony of the piece is that it is a memory of a relationship collapsing in part because of an inability to let go of a past relationship. In fact the book itself is full of voices that are imbued with this kind of burden.

Take the very first poem, "Younger". Here the London landscape is one of reminiscence - "A hundred lives ago with someone like you / up among the stucco wedding cakes of Campden Hill". The poem dramatises the speaker's dwindling moments of optimism, symbolised by the memory of gazing through a window ("I stood in front of the big studio-window / and thought I could really see"). The final stanza opens, "sometimes I see the open window", but the stress here is firmly on the idea of rarely. The poem glances back to Wordsworth's comment on his own losses in Book XII of The Prelude - "I see by glimpses now; when age comes on, / may scarcely see at all."

In general, Stammers' first collection felt lighter and airier, was frequently closer to a sense of spontaneity. This book is a conscious move into a more burdened space and perhaps, as he implies in "Younger", the price is a loss of insouciance. An interesting perspective on this is provided by the pamphlet Buffalo Bills that Stammers published last summer. Here we have a sensibility that feels closer to the exuberance of his first collection. The pamphlet offers a sequence of 24 variations on ee cummings's elegy for Buffalo Bill - there are poems for, among others, Tommy Cooper, James Dean, Stalin and Greta Garbo. The whole thing is fast paced, swerving from one image to another, comic and moving in turns. There is less foregrounding of a self. One of Stammers's most impressive qualities is the ease with which he moves through a whole range of styles and tones, his constant capacity to surprise. It is important that the accomplishments of Stolen Love Behaviour remain an option rather than a norm.

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